Professor Takayuki Katsuyama is a Visiting Scholar at Clare Hall and St Catharine’s College, visiting us from Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. He tells us about his research below. If you are, or know, a Visiting Scholar who is interested in the Renaissance, get in touch.

Takayuki Katsuyama, Doshisha University, Japan

For the last ten years I have been working on a project: “Shakespeare and English Cartography in the 16th and 17th Century.” The project has been partly sponsored by the MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan). The whole project was published last year in book form, titled “The English Cartography and Shakespeare’s Plays”. As I did this research on the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and English map-making, I found it was important to investigate how the Englishmen fashioned themselves as “cosmopolitans”, through foreign trade in the Mediterranean Sea. The encounters with the people of different cultures and religions, constituted as “Other” to them – Moroccans, Indians, Turks, Moors, Egyptians and Persians – must have exerted a great influence over the formation of “English” identities. I am sure that my time spent researching at Cambridge will help me a lot in developing and expanding my project on the English map to the Mediterranean map, so that I can complete my next book, which will be titled “Shakespeare and the Orient”.

TITLE-PAGE, anthony nixon, The three English brothers (lONDON, 1607)